Department of Sociology

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The present Department of Sociology was established as a combined Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by the University of North Bengal in 1976. Professor Niren Ch. Choudhury, eminent anthropologist, was the first Professor and Head of the Department who provided the leadership in the formative years of the Department.Professor R.K.Bhadra and Dr.Namita Choudhury were associated with him since inception of this department and helped in the process of its development. The bifurcation between sociology and anthropology took place in 2001 and thus the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology was renamed Department of Sociology and a separate Department of Anthropology was established under the Science Faculty. From its beginning the Department of Sociology has been training students for three courses: M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. The Department has produced more than 30 Ph.Ds and more than one thousand Masters. Besides the two main programmes the Department invites visiting faculty, from the reputed national and international universities and the faculty of this department visit the universities abroad on visiting faculty programme and for attending seminars/conferences. The teachers of the Department encourage students to take part in academic discussions outside the class-room interaction and encourage them to present papers in seminars/conferences. In recognition of the good work done by the Department the University Grants’ Commission (UGC) has granted the Special Assistance Programme (DRS – 1) in 2007 which has facilitated undertaking a good number of research projects on issues relating to gender question and the problem of ethnicity in the North Bengal region. The Department has been organizing a national level seminar every year on the gender and ethnicity related issues, which constitute the focal theme of the SAP. As a part of the programme the Department publishes Occasional Papers and edited volumes based on the research articles that are produced under different SAP related programs.

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Author: search.filters.author.Bhowmick, ArunimaStart date: 2022

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    Leisurely Consumption and Freedom in Everyday Life
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bhowmick, Arunima
    This paper comes as an initiative to unravel the areas, like leisurely and especially leisurely consumptions, popularly associated with freedom and show how those could become the very source of unfreedom. Upon discussing the nuances of the neoliberal society and its entwined practices of consumption, I have tried to highlight the dialectical relation between freedom-dependency. The desire to be free is universal and perpetual, but this very desire is fraught with tendencies of dependency. Therefore, metaphysics and science both together have tried to explore the desire to be free and consequently encountered conditions and notions of the unfree. This paper wants to unclog notions of “absolute freedom” and “relative freedom” from the popular imagination, hinting at the everyday sources of unfreedom and associated negotiations to secure either form of freedom. Thus, build a commentary that reflects as it recites the micro experiences of remaining vulnerable to power, both normative and culturally transpired, and then finding counter-power positions of liberation—as mere illusions leading to further unfreedom.
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    Material Objects, Materiality and Social Lives
    (University of North Bengal, 2022-03) Bhowmick, Arunima
    Scholars have long invoked ideas of totemism, fetishism and anthropomorphism as ways of conceptualizing the relation between humans and their material world. All perspectives, I believe, offer modes of ‘being’ for both the subjects and objects, transcending and shuffling subjectivity with desired objectification as and when socially necessary and culturally permissible. Neither the human subjects nor the material objects remain constant subjects and/or objects across space and time. subjectivity is objectively constituted and reciprocally, objectivity is also subjectively articulated. So, what becomes essential here is the appearance of objects and the meaning they entail, as assigned by the experiencing subject to the objects it manages, engages with and feels through and for them. The experiences arise in an intersubjective negotiation, whereby the material object is transported from its natural to a culturally-defining set up, then again returned to its ‘nature’ over time. The object travels through a life along with its subject, followed by periodic injunctions of sociability and renewal of its being. This cyclical journey from cultural significance to objectification to acquiring subjective agency and then returning to its naturalness again, the object produces a social life that’s no less significant than that of its human associates. This paper shall remain an epistemological exercise for brining into foray these notions and empirically delineating a similar discourse.